I think I was an adult before I learned that pickles are processed cucumbers. They look, feel and taste different enough that it doesn’t surprise me that some people don’t know that.
I once read something online written by a young adult who said he didn’t know how to read an analog clock. That was surprising to me, but I guess analog clocks are getting uncommon enough that one can get by without that knowledge.
We have an analog clock in the living room to teach the Grandkids.
Well, I am old enough to remember analog clocks in my school. Let’s just say it’s a good thing they had bells saying when class was out. I totally missed that whole lesson. My Daddy figured it out when I was about 10. He tried unsuccessfully to make me understand it. I could not.
I never could remember my locker number, either. Didn’t matter I couldn’t do the combination lock anyway.
I’m allergic to numbers.
This kind of thing goes way back. When I was a senior in high school, thirty-plus years ago, we had to deliberately set all the digital clocks in the house to random times to force my younger sisters to learn how to read the hands on the analog faces. If our parents hadn’t done that, it’s entirely possible my sisters could have gotten through to young adulthood without ever learning.
About six months ago I was teaching a trigonometry class (community college). The majority of the students in this particular class were in high school. I started doing an example on arc length on a circle, where the task was to find the distance the tip of the minute hand of a clock travels in x minutes. After setting up the problem, I said “wait a minute - do they still teach you all how to read analog clocks in school?”
The answer was a resounding “yes, of course.” Some of them were clearly insulted that I’d asked. I won’t make that mistake again!
Yes..my grandkids have brought clock face worksheets home plenty.
You can pickle all sorts of stuff, not just cucumbers.
And, while they’re obviously cucumbers if you know what pickling cukes look like, it might not be obvious to somebody who only eats other types as fresh cucumbers; or for that matter to somebody who doesn’t eat fresh cucumbers at all, except maybe already chopped up into pieces. Some households don’t buy much in the way of fresh veggies, and in some that do the food purchaser (unlikely to be the sixth-grader) just doesn’t much like fresh cucumbers.
Clear back somewhere around 1970, my mother was shocked that my oldest sister’s small children didn’t recognize a fresh orange. She didn’t blame the kids, though; she blamed my sister – who’d been giving them orange juice every morning, and hadn’t thought it necessary to also buy them oranges.
I mean, you can… but my kids (then 9 and 7) reaction to pickled boiled eggs with beetroot juice was:
A) delight, (as they were making them with me) and then, when requested to eat them,
B) horror
My first year teaching math at a private middle school, it took me a while to realize why the kids kept raising their hands during tests to ask “how much more time?” when there was a clock right there on the wall.
I don’t think it’s obvious that they are cucumbers at all - I’m not sure I’ve ever seen cucumbers as small as dill pickles or dill pickles as large as cucumbers. Not to mention that once they’re pickled, I’m not sure I could tell a pickled cucumber from a pickled zucchini by looking.
I never had this pickle confusion because they are called “Gewürzgurken” in Germany which means spice(d) cucumbers, but for those who didn’t know that they are cucumbers: what did you think were they actually made of? A vegetable called “pickle”?
This.
As a I kid I was only familiar with pickles as the sort pre-sliced in a jar of juice. So little green disks. I was probably 10 or 12 before I first noticed whole pickles at the store.
I was about that same age when I discovered that “pickling” was a general food preservation process that could be applied to something other than the “pickle” vegetable slices I’d been happily eating for years.
Even now, 50+ years later I eat very few pickled anythings except dilled cucumber pickles. And sauerkraut.
This might be specific to English, but for some reason, it only seems to be cucumbers that are simply called “pickles” - everything else is “pickled onions”, “pickled peppers” and so on.
I’ve met Chinese people who use “pickles” to mean “any pickled vegetables, including cabbage and radishes.”
The Persian word ترش (torsh) meaning “sour” is the root of ترشی (torshi) which is a general term for any of many different kinds of pickled vegetables or mixtures of pickles. Looking at the wiki article, I see this Persian word has migrated into several other languages with more or less the same meaning.
In my experience, Persians don’t translate this to a generic “pickle” in English; they just say torshi. But the sense is the same.
Speaking of pickled items, my first exposure to things other than pickles and pickled beets was at the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s. I used to order the chicken pot pie, and it came with a “pickle bowl” which contained an assortment of pickled vegetables; I remember cauliflower being one of them. This was not something we ever had at home so it was a special treat for me. It was years before I was doing my own shopping and found that it was sold in stores.
In Japanese, any pickled Japanese vegetable is “漬物” (read as “つけもの/tsukemono”). “漬ける“ (read as ”つける/tsukeru”) means “to pickle” and “mono” means “thing”, so “pickled thing”. But in general, “tsukemono” really only refers to Japanese vegetables and when referring to western-style pickles, like those on a hamburger, they call them “ピクルス” (always written in katakana and read as “pickles”). The world of Japanese pickles is deep and wide, but things like pickled eggs aren’t common at all.
When I grew up 60-70 years ago, pickles, pickled cucumbers, were the only pickled foot* food I ever heard of.
Today, almost every non-American-style restaurant has a variety of pickled stuff, a cornucopia of foods for every possible taste. Has to be one of the hugest and least recognized food booms in recent years
Looking back, I never realized that pickled peppers were a real food, other than words forced into a tongue twister.
Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers.
* Never heard of pickled feet either no matter what my fingers think. Even though pickled pig’s feet are actually a thing, maybe even a mono.
Pickled meats of all kinds fed many people well before refrigeration was normal. When you butchered a hog, without access to refridge/freezer, you had to do other things. Pickled, smoked, cured, shared with neighbors, ate really fast.
It had to be like that or you lose your investment in said, hog.
My experience in the 70s in Germany was different. Besides the ubiquitous pickled cucumbers, there were and still are “Mixed Pickles”, sold under that English name and consisting of cucumbers, carrots, glass onions, peppers, cauliflower and baby maize. They were a staple of party food but also as a side dish for sandwiches at dinner.